This month, we’re celebrating animation from Japan–better known as anime–by looking at some of our favorite works or ones we hope will provide new perspective. This also ties into our upcoming Spring issue of the zine, which is all about gaining new insights through films that are ‘foreign to us.’ See all the articles here.

by Garrett Smith, Staff Writer

I guess this is how all articles start in 2021–DURING THE PANDEMIC–my watching habits changed quite a bit. And one of the genres I had a brief love-affair with was anime. Like many other American millennials, I grew up watching Toonami on Cartoon Network, and in college watched Death Note, Afro Samurai, and Akira. But I never got around to seeking out some of the “classic” titles that helped to initially bring the genre to popularity around the globe. Thanks to a bevy of streaming services and an unprecedented amount of couch time in 2021, I was finally able to give myself an anime history lesson that I will now share with you.

All of these titles are feature-length films and available on streaming platforms as of this writing (denoted next to each). While I watched approximately 20 titles that I could have included here, I selected my favorites among them and chose to order them such that, in my opinion, you will be hooked and want to continue digging deeper, ticking off a variety of genres along the way. Though it should be noted that this list reflects my personal journey through what’s currently available and skews heavily towards action-oriented, male-POV titles, and anime has a lot more to offer than just this subset of material.

With that, here’s your handy starter-pack for getting into anime, today!

Ghost in the Shell (dir. Mamoru Oshii, 1995) — Tubi

Probably the most well-known and influential movie on this list, Ghost in the Shell is a movie I had been hearing and reading about for decades before finally seeing it this year. We follow the story of “The Major,” a cyborg cop that is on the trail of “The Puppet Master,” a hacker that is taking over people’s cybernetically-enhanced brains. As The Major uncovers the conspiracy behind The Puppet Master’s identity, she begins to question her own existence and purpose, and what it is to define your “self” in a world of interconnected, advanced technologies.

As someone that grew up on The Matrix trilogy and other cyberpunk stories that were inspired by this, I half-expected to be underwhelmed by it. Instead, I was blown away by how well this lives up to its reputation. The animation is beautiful, and the existential angst of its brain-hacking plot felt prescient and relevant rather than “silly in retrospect,” as can happen with sci-fi stories as we inch into their future. This takes place in 2029, and I frankly don’t think it’s that crazy to think we’ll be relatively close to the world this movie depicts by then.

But even if we don’t go fully down the evolutionary path that this movie depicts, its ruminations on death and what it means to be “alive” will remain affecting, as this kind of story can act as an evergreen metaphor for the horror of the mind-body problem.

Ninja Scroll (dir. Yoshiaki Kawajiri, 1993) — Hulu

This is basically exactly what I expected anime to be when I first heard about it as a kid. “Adult” in the sense that it features somewhat graphic sex and violence, but “adolescent” in its employment of both. It’s a pretty standard ninja story, where masters of various practices with special, phantasmagoric powers face-off in a series of creative duels mostly meant to show off the animation. It’s generally pretty fun, and the animation style is what you probably think of as the prototypical style of the genre, with a strong sense of atmosphere.

The female lead, Kagero, has an interesting story that on one hand kind of elevates this movie a bit, and on the other is a reminder of how misogynist these stories can be. She’s an exceptional warrior that is poisonous to the touch, which means the movie has rape scenes (unfortunately common in the genre) but also a vengeance fantasy in which men that abuse her are punished as a matter of fact for their actions. Her ultimate fate undermines some of the strength of her initial characterization and results in the overall adolescent tone of the sexual violence and its use in the movie. So overall, I thought this movie was a pretty strong example of what Americans probably think of when they think of Anime, both good and bad, with a somewhat thoughtful approach to “the bad.”

Golgo 13: The Professional (dir. Osamu Dezaki, 1983) — Amazon Prime, Tubi

Based on a manga character akin to James Bond, Golgo 13 is one of my favorite discoveries on this list. If I had been asked to write a quote for its VHS box, it would have said something like “Imagine 007 directed by Michael Mann in impressionistic animation.” I suppose Golgo 13 isn’t a super spy as much as he’s an assassin, but the way he seduces every woman he meets while undermining government agencies and getting into car chases under neon-lit cityscapes will convince you I’m making the correct parallels here.

This is just cool, in the way things were “cool” in the 80s and 90s. If there were an American adaptation of this, especially at the time of this movie’s release, you could imagine a young, hunky Stallone in the role. It’s also sleazy and weird, frequently dipping into full on pornography and occasionally getting psychedelic in its imagery and use of the frame. There’s some really creative sequences where we watch action play out across multiple fields simultaneously through various split screens.

This also features one of the earliest uses of CGI in a movie, and while it looks pretty fucking ridiculous when it happens, it’s an interesting footnote that makes this an important entry in the greater canon. Highly recommend this one.

Appleseed (dir. Kazuyoshi Katayama, 1988) — Amazon Prime

This is potentially a very personal pick, though I do remember seeing this movie come up a lot when I was looking up lists of anime on imdb.com as a youngster. This is a cyberpunk / post-apocalypse story about a counterterrorism unit in Olympus, a city built to be a utopia after World War III decimated the planet. It’s a bit loose in its storytelling, so it doesn’t dig terribly deep into its own ideas, but it’s kind of a twisted narrative in that the antagonists are who we would normally be rooting for in a story like this. This probably rubs some people the wrong way, but I think there’s meant to be some irony in this storytelling choice.

I don’t know if this has been discussed elsewhere online, I imagine it has - but this kind of seems like one of the origin points for vaporwave to me. If you’re not familiar with the a e s t h e t i c (or vaporwave) movement, it’s best characterized by animated Japanese cityscapes set to infomercial music, and I’m now just describing multiple scenes from this movie. This movement didn’t really pop up until the days of Tumblr, but it seems likely this would be a key text in the vaporwave canon. I’m a big fan of vaporwave aesthetics so this movie really, really worked for me, but more on an experiential level than a narrative one.

This studio, Gainax, would go on to produce Neon Genesis: Evagnelion, perhaps THE most influential anime to my generation, and a series I wholeheartedly recommend seeking out (though its current home on Netflix provides a slightly altered version of the show and you should look up why that matters before watching).

Space Adventure Cobra: The Movie (dir. Osamu Dezaki, 1982) — Tubi

From the director of Golgo 13: The Professional comes a psychedelic space opera about a cigar-smoking pirate named Cobra who has a “psycho-gun” for an arm. It makes no sense at all and has a goddamn good time doing it. The art is beautiful, even if the animation is a little rugged. It’s got wild musical numbers where robots play space-organs while colors flash across the screen, a villain named Crystal Bowie that looks like C-3PO in a Doctor Doom cloak, and horny space-discotheques on ice planets.

Part of me wishes this movie were a little more plot driven, but as an almost purely psychedelic experience it’s kind of transcendent. I had trouble paying attention to it, but only in the sense that it just washed over me as an exciting combination of sights and sounds. I’ve included it here as an example of how far the boundaries of storytelling can be pushed in animation, and how exciting that is when we’re specifically talking about Anime - but also just as a personal favorite.

Belladonna of Sadness (dir. Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973) — Kanopy, Tubi

I think for some folks reading this list, this entry will feel like a complete left turn. The art and animation style is completely different from my prior selections, with a very hand-crafted feeling and beautiful watercolor finish. The story is much more serious in tone, about a peasant woman that is raped by the nobility on her wedding day and then turns to Satan and witchcraft to enact her revenge. And its reputation as a classic is very recent, as this was nearly lost to time after its initial commercial failure.

But I found this to be the most moving, most exceptional movie I watched over the course of my rapid self-indoctrination to anime. This movie is so thematically rich, with the form serving as the perfect storytelling function for this story. And its vengeance fantasy is certainly the most complete and fulfilling of anything on this list. I cannot recommend this movie more highly, though I’ve included it this far down the list thinking that it would perhaps be an initial turn-off if it were your first foray into the genre.

Robot Carnival (dirs. Koji Morimoto, Katsuhiro Otomo, Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Yasuomi Umetsu, Hiroyuki Kitazume, Takashi Nakamura, Manabu Oohashi, Hidetoshi Ômori, 1987)

Memories (dirs. Koji Morimoto, Katsuhiro Otomo, Tensai Okamura, 1995) — Amazon Prime, Tubi

I’m including these two anthology movies together as kind of a bonus here. These movies feature work by some of Anime’s best directors, in varying styles of art and animation, and offer some of the most fun (and funny) stories I’ve seen in the medium yet. These were my favorite movies of everything that I watched, I think just because they show off the versatility of Anime and its creators so well. You get beautiful, heart-wrenching drama and wild, slapstick comedy all within the same movie. You really could probably start with these, but I thought they might feel like great finales to this project, sending you off with the promise of further depths to plumb.

Daicon IV Opening Animation (dir. Hiroyuki Yamaga, 1983) — Youtube

Alright so I have one last bonus for you, and it’s one of my most favorite pieces of animation, created as the opening video segment for a science-fiction convention in Japan called Nihon SF Taikai, often referred to as either TOKON or DAICON depending on its location (Tokyo vs Osaka). This is an amateur production, credited to 12 animators, and contains references to all kinds of pop-culture, both from Japan and America. At just 6 minutes, and with none of the licenses required, this team of animators unites everything from Godzilla to Star Trek as a Japanese woman in a Playboy Bunny outfit surfs on Michael Moonrock’s Stormbreaker through the history of eastern and western pop-culture, fighting mobile suits, Xenomorphs, and even lightsaber battling Darth Vader, all set to some great (once again unlicensed) Electric Light Orchestra tunes. It’s the best, most illegal animation I’ve ever seen, and you can have a blast breaking the law with me over on Youtube.

As I mentioned before, there’s a lot of other kinds of Anime out there that may be more to your liking. This list is kind of a rollercoaster through some of what I understood to be the major canon as we understand it here in America. It also leaves out the legacy of Anime on television, which is just as wide and varied and deserves your attention as well. But hopefully this serves as a nice starter-pack to whet your appetite for more.